The Big Short-movie reviewDecember 14, 2015

MoviesDecember 14, 2015 The Big Short By Mark Roget When Adam McKay, co-writer (with Charles Randolph) and director of The Big Short first considered doing the film, he obviously had visions of following in the footsteps of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Margin Call (2011). Not only does The Short fail in comparison, but it breaks down in so many other ways. Based on Michael Lewis’s 2010 book of the same name, The Big Short is supposed to be about the financial panic of 2008 in which mortgages and banks collapsed. But, the messy film never touches on what really sparked the economic firestorm. The prime culprit was the Community Reinvestment Act. Passed by the Jimmy Carter administration in 1977, and then strengthened by Bill Clinton in 1994 and again in 1995, the Act had the government and its politicians pushing loans on people who couldn’t afford to buy a house. In addition, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s role in the fiasco is never brought up. The two government entities eased credit requirements on the mortgages it bought from banks which encouraged the banks to extend home mortgages to people who had bad credit, no source of income, and insufficient income to pay the mortgages. It’s interesting to note that the heads of those government agencies made a fortune. That, of course, is never allowed into the film—the greediness and corruption of government officials is never a consideration. Furthermore, the easier mortgage terms invited speculators that pushed up home prices, which added to the creation of the housing bubble.

Because none of the above are in the film, the crash is misrepresented, which makes The Big Short nothing more than propaganda. But then, when has Hollywood ever gotten Wall Street and Capitalism right. (to understand the economic disaster, read Meltdown by Thomas E. Woods Jr.). So, if the film never explains the real cause of the housing crash, what is its focus? Its center is on a bunch of high-priced stars who portray their characters with eccentricities that the director believes will make them interesting. Christian Bale portrays Michael Burry as a fund manager who has problems relating to people, and who walks around barefoot, wearing beach shorts and a T-shirt in his office. He comes across as so inept and childlike that it’s hard to believe that he has the mental acuity to go through piles of packaged mortgages to conclude that they are bad.

Ryan Gosling doesn’t play a real person, but a made-up character who serves the purpose of explaining technical jargon (such as subprime, credit swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and the definition of a “short”), which, no matter how many tinker toys he uses to explain financial concepts, remains confusing.

Steve Carell, plays Mark Baum as an arrogant, enraged hedge-fund manager who bemoans how morally inferior others are while he rakes in millions. And then there is a bearded Brad Pitt (one of the film’s producers) who plays a super-rich retired financier who believes that the system from which he made a fortune is corrupt. All those characters are hypocrites who have one thing in common. They have discovered that mortgage-backed securities are not AAA investments, but worthless paper. They come to the conclusion that they can make a killing by betting on the failure of those instruments. McKay treats them as though they are exemplary moralists. They talk a lot about the lack of morality in the financial community while they rake in gobs of money for themselves. It’s not bad enough that it’s often difficult to follow the action of the film, but McKay adds to the scattershot feel of the flick by interrupting the story with celebrity guests—Selena Gomez in a Las Vegas casino, Anthony Bourdain in his kitchen, and Margot Robbie with a bottle of champagne in a bubble bath--trying to explain the housing-banking crisis with the lowest-common denominator examples that will most likely be offensive to anyone who knows anything about finance. The camera work by Barry Ackroyd is supposed to make the film look like a documentary, but the cutting interruptions in which the actors talk directly to the audience breaks the fourth wall, giving the movie an amateurish appearance. As they left their seats and filed out of the theater, moviegoers were heard expressing confusion as to what they had just seen. And it was obvious that they were not pleased with the movie’s lack of enlightenment and entertainment. Indeed, The Big Short is a big bust.